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The US government should spend at least $1.25 billion "to invest in Western-based alternatives to Chinese equipment providers Huawei and ZTE," a bipartisan group of six US senators said yesterday.

The senators submitted legislation called the Utilizing Strategic Allied (USA) Telecommunications Act to make that happen, arguing that the US must counter the Chinese government's investments in the telecom sector. The money would come from spectrum-auction proceeds, and the $1.25 billion in grants would be spread out over 10 years. The money would support development of new 5G technology, with a focus on equipment that complies with open standards to ensure "multi-vendor network equipment interoperability."

The senators' announcement said:

Heavily subsidized by the Chinese government, Huawei is poised to become the leading commercial provider of 5G, with far-reaching effects for US economic and national security. With close ties to the Communist Party of China, Chinese state-directed technology companies present unacceptable risks to our national security and to the integrity of information networks globally. However, US efforts to convince foreign partners to ban Huawei from their networks have stalled amid concerns about a lack of viable, affordable alternatives.

The senators who sponsored the legislation are Mark R. Warner (D-Va.); Richard Burr (R-N.C.); Bob Menendez (D-N.J.); Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Michael Bennet (D-Colo.); and John Cornyn (R-Texas). Burr and Warner are the chair and vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, while Cornyn, Rubio, and Bennet are members of that committee. Menendez is ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rubio is also a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

"Every month that the US does nothing, Huawei stands poised to become the cheapest, fastest, most ubiquitous global provider of 5G, while US and Western companies and workers lose out on market share and jobs," Warner said.

Burr said it would be "disastrous if Huawei, a company that operates at the behest of the Chinese government, military, and intelligence services, is allowed to take over the 5G market unchecked."

Two funds

The senators' bill would create a Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund of at least $750 million and a Multilateral Telecommunications Security Fund of at least $500 million.

The $750 million fund would be administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), but the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies would help establish criteria for awarding grants. Those grants would pay for research into software, hardware, and microprocessor technology "that will enhance competitiveness" in 5G "and successor wireless technology supply chains." This fund would also support "development and deployment of open interface standards-based compatible, interoperable equipment," including equipment that meets the Open Radio Access Network standard (O-RAN). Individual grants could be as high as $20 million each.

The senators said they want to support O-RAN to "allow for alternative vendors to enter the market for specific network components, rather than having to compete with Huawei end-to-end."

The $500 million multilateral fund would be administered by the Secretary of State and focus on projects involving the United States and other countries. The Secretary of State would have to strike "agreement[s] with foreign government partners" to fund projects that "support the development and adoption of secure and trusted telecommunications technologies." Under this plan, the US would try to get funding commitments from countries involved in the proposed joint projects.

“Race” to 5G?

The senators said these funds will help the US win "the race for 5G." The Federal Communications Commission's Republican majority has repeatedly cited the "race to 5G" as justification for eliminating federal rules and preempting municipal regulations that cover deployment of wireless equipment in US cities and towns.

Whether there is actually a "race" between the US and China when it comes to deploying 5G to each country's residents is debatable. The US switching from 4G to 5G slightly later than China wouldn't prevent the US from getting the benefits of 5G, such as they are: carriers admit that 5G networks based on millimeter-wave frequencies won't come close to covering the whole US and that 5G on lower-frequency bands will only be slightly faster than 4G.

Further Reading

Moreover, the US faces more pressing problems because many rural areas don't even have consistent 4G access, and most US homes lack fiber broadband. Fiber, in addition to providing high-speed home Internet, is crucial for supplying bandwidth to 5G networks. But ISPs don't want to spend the money to deploy nationwide fiber, and the FCC's planned $20 billion rural-broadband fund will pay ISPs to deploy either fiber or services that are much slower and come with restrictive data caps.

Further Reading

But for both mobile and home broadband networks, expanding alternatives to Huawei and ZTE network gear is important for meeting the US government's goal of phasing out Chinese telecom equipment. That's particularly true for small, rural ISPs that have relied on the Chinese companies' offerings.

The FCC in November voted unanimously to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF), saying the equipment could have backdoors installed at the behest of the Chinese government. This ban affects only future projects and the use of federal funding to maintain existing equipment, but the FCC may also eventually require removal of Huawei and ZTE gear from networks that have already been built. Huawei has sued the FCC in an attempt to overturn the ban, saying the commission "fail[ed] to substantiate its arbitrary findings with evidence or sound reasoning or analysis."

How carriers, particularly small carriers, will pay for a move away from Chinese equipment is an open question. The FCC is seeking public comment on how to pay for removing and replacing the equipment.

The new bill for 5G research doesn't allocate funding directly toward replacing Chinese equipment in current networks, but senators said the bill "create[s] a transition plan for the purchase of new equipment by carriers that will be forward-compatible with forthcoming O-RAN equipment so small and rural carriers are not left behind." If the bill passes, recipients of FCC grants for replacing Chinese equipment with new 5G technology would have to submit plans outlining how they will switch to standards-based equipment.

Why is 5G so important that we need to subsidize it? If the technology has merit why not let technology companies fund the development that they will then make money from?

5G has some advantages in the higher bands for throughput, but other than that, it's essentially useless.

My paranoid brain says it's trying to pave the way for universal monitoring of Internet users via wireless interception of traffic. 20 years ago, the world didn't have the computing power to do that. Today, it does.

But I'm sensing an urgency for something that, at least from what I read, isn't that urgently needed nor that in demand.

Why is 5G so important that we need to subsidize it? If the technology has merit why not let technology companies fund the development that they will then make money from?

because it IS going to be used globally, every nation every carrier. 5G will displace 2G, 3G, and yes eventually LTE networks. In time nobody will deploy anything but 5G hardware. It has been heavily subsidized by China so the default scenario would be the entire world uses Chinese telecom hardware for the next decade or so. That would also mean that when whatever comes along to replace 5G will almost certainly be developed and produced by China due to nobody else producing hardware for a decade or more. That means China remains the dominant telecom equipment provider for everything that comes after that.

Should we subsidize? Will subsidizing development this late help any? I have no idea. Honestly we should have been having this debate five years ago when 5G was entering into final draft specification.

5G has some advantages in the higher bands for throughput, but other than that, it's essentially useless.

5G will in time replace everything cellular used today. At every frequency it provides higher tower throughput. A lot of articles have been written on connection speeds when what really matters is higher tower throughput (how much tower provides collectively to all all users simultaneously). 5G isn't just mmWave. It is the next generation of cellular equipment.

In 10 years there will be nothing but 5G equipment being deployed. Hell T-Mobile started two years ago. All the radios they put up in their new 600 MHz band are LTE/5G dual protocol radios. Nobody will be making or buying legacy hardware pretty soon. Much like how today nobody is deploying 2G radios we will reach a point where nobody is deploying new LTE radios either.

Spectrum is finite. Data demands are continually increasing. The only way you get more throughput out of the same amount of spectrum is higher spectral efficiency (bits/Hz). 5G does that. You may think it is useless but in 5-10 years you WILL be using a 5G phone and connecting to a 5G tower as carriers shut off legacy systems and reuse that spectrum to support higher throughput as a 5G service.

If they didn't eventually your LTE service would seem as sluggish as 3G does now as demand exceeds capacity and everyone gets throttled down. Either demand for more data stops growing or towers need more throughput.

To be clear I am not saying we should subsidize 5G equipment manufacturing. Hell we are way late to this party not sure we could turn the ship if we tried but 5G WILL be the cellular technology which powers the world over the next decade or two.

The primary technical reason is it lets the carriers utilize their existing low band spectrum more efficiently. The secondary technical reason is adding new radios and capabilities to access mid band (e.g. CBRS for rural) and mm wave (for congested areas) spectrum. The primary non-technical reason is for the carriers' use as a bludgeoning tool in their quest for total deregulation.

US government has not produced any evidence of the backdoors that they claim are in the Huawei hardware, despite access to both the hardware and software. They complain that China is subsidizing Huawei, and thus cannot be trusted. Solution - subsidize US router companies to roll out 2nd-best hardware for tech that is minimally (if at all) better than current tech. And do it while a large portion of the country does not even have access to useful levels of the current tech. Yep, sounds like some congressman's brother is going to make a lot of money.

We are still fighting ISPs to deploy broadband in rural areas, and get more competition. Only to have them fail to meet their expectations by the next merger, and ultimately be lied to by these same companies.

5g has terrible range, gets blocked by physical barriers, and wont help my life substantially. Can someone provide a reason why this billion should be used by current ISPs and not to setup municipal broadband where carriers have failed to deploy?

Why is 5G so important that we need to subsidize it? If the technology has merit why not let technology companies fund the development that they will then make money from?

because it IS going to be used globally, every nation every carrier. 5G will displace 2G, 3G, and yes eventually LTE networks. In time nobody will deploy anything but 5G hardware. It has been heavily subsidized by China so the default scenario would be the entire world uses Chinese telecom hardware for the next decade or so. That would also mean that when whatever comes along to replace 5G will almost certainly be developed and produced by China due to nobody else producing hardware for a decade or more. That means China remains the dominant telecom equipment provider for everything that comes after that.

Should we subsidize? Will subsidizing development this late help any? I have no idea. Honestly we should have been having this debate five years ago when 5G was entering into final draft specification.

- To have this debate 5 years ago by the leaders of the ruling party (Republican) requires forward thinking (a technological vision) which includes an active role for government at the federal, state & municipal levels. - Instead the Pai led FCC removed themselves from monitoring net neutrality going along with the wishes of large ISPs like Verizon. In addition the Pai led FCC has gone to the courts to remove state & local governments from trying to implement net neutrality. - Now, some Senators have realized the US is very late to the game so that China is taking the lead in telecom technology. And they want the federal government to take a funding role?When Pai and his ISP partners have said that the government should have no role in telecommunications?

On so many levels this makes no sense unless the government in Washington DC does a complete turn around and focuses on what is good for people as a whole. (And moves away from helping the ISPs to get as much profit as they can in the short term.)

I'm all for research and/or development grants, but if you want to promote open standards and really drive the entirety of the US sector - then the money needs to be contagiously patent free (i.e. derivatives are also not patentable). Otherwise you'll do the traditional job of paying companies to develop technologies that they patent. Even worse (with respect to the objectives of this funding) China will do it's normal reverse-engineering and stomp all over the patent while other US competitors will be much more tightly bound by the domestic legal restrictions in place for IP.

Why is 5G so important that we need to subsidize it? If the technology has merit why not let technology companies fund the development that they will then make money from?

because it IS going to be used globally, every nation every carrier. 5G will displace 2G, 3G, and yes eventually LTE networks. In time nobody will deploy anything but 5G hardware. It has been heavily subsidized by China so the default scenario would be the entire world uses Chinese telecom hardware for the next decade or so. That would also mean that when whatever comes along to replace 5G will almost certainly be developed and produced by China due to nobody else producing hardware for a decade or more. That means China remains the dominant telecom equipment provider for everything that comes after that.

Should we subsidize? Will subsidizing development this late help any? I have no idea. Honestly we should have been having this debate five years ago when 5G was entering into final draft specification.

- To have this debate 5 years ago by the leaders of the ruling party (Republican) requires forward thinking (a technological vision) which includes an active role for government at the federal, state & municipal levels. - Instead the Pai led FCC removed themselves from monitoring net neutrality going along with the wishes of large ISPs like Verizon. In addition the Pai led FCC has gone to the courts to remove state & local governments from trying to implement net neutrality. - Now, some Senators have realized the US is very late to the game that China is taking the lead in telecom technology. And they want the federal government to take a funding role?When Pai and his ISP partners have said that the government should have no role in telecommunications?

On so many levels this makes no sense unless the government in Washington DC does a complete turn around and focuses on what is good for people as a whole. (And moves away from helping the ISPs to get as much profit as they can in the short term.)

Fear. They (finally) realized how dependent the world is on next gen Chinese telecom hardware.

Like most solutions created in fear that involve desperately throwing large amounts of money at the problem I expect very good things will come from this.

Wondering why they wouldn't turn a piece of the money over to DARPA. Since the US is considering this a national security issue, it seems it would make sense.

DARPA is extremely good at helping with the development of new technologies, but it is not an agency that is specialized in commercialization. This looks to me like a 5G version of the minuteman and Apollo programs that helped develop the pre-LSI integrated circuit technology in the 1960s.

Why is 5G so important that we need to subsidize it? If the technology has merit why not let technology companies fund the development that they will then make money from?

because it IS going to be used globally, every nation every carrier. 5G will displace 2G, 3G, and yes eventually LTE networks. In time nobody will deploy anything but 5G hardware. It has been heavily subsidized by China so the default scenario would be the entire world uses Chinese telecom hardware for the next decade or so. That would also mean that when whatever comes along to replace 5G will almost certainly be developed and produced by China due to nobody else producing hardware for a decade or more. That means China remains the dominant telecom equipment provider for everything that comes after that.

Should we subsidize? Will subsidizing development this late help any? I have no idea. Honestly we should have been having this debate five years ago when 5G was entering into final draft specification.

- To have this debate 5 years ago by the leaders of the ruling party (Republican) requires forward thinking (a technological vision) which includes an active role for government at the federal, state & municipal levels. - Instead the Pai led FCC removed themselves from monitoring net neutrality going along with the wishes of large ISPs like Verizon. In addition the Pai led FCC has gone to the courts to remove state & local governments from trying to implement net neutrality. - Now, some Senators have realized the US is very late to the game that China is taking the lead in telecom technology. And they want the federal government to take a funding role?When Pai and his ISP partners have said that the government should have no role in telecommunications?

On so many levels this makes no sense unless the government in Washington DC does a complete turn around and focuses on what is good for people as a whole. (And moves away from helping the ISPs to get as much profit as they can in the short term.)

Fear. Throwing money at the problem because they (finally) realized how dependent the world is on next gen Chinese telecom hardware.

Like most solutions created in fear that involve throwing large amounts of money at the problem I expect very good things will come from this.

I agree with you Statistical. You just need to add a /s to the end of your comment.

I'm all for research and/or development grants, but if you want to promote open standards and really drive the entirety of the US sector - then the money needs to be contagiously patent free (i.e. derivatives are also not patentable). Otherwise you'll do the traditional job of paying companies to develop technologies that they patent. Even worse (with respect to the objectives of this funding) China will do it's normal reverse-engineering and stomp all over the patent while other US competitors will be much more tightly bound by the domestic legal restrictions in place for IP.

You do realise that this is implicitly stating that Huawei is in front of US in tech and that is why government needs to help qualcom (like there is anyone else).

If anyone is going to do industrial espionage it will be NSA (who are probably ones crying the most since they can't just order Huawei to put in backdoors like they did with US gear).

So Qualcomm and Cisco aren't investing sufficiently in 5G, but the allure of a maximum $20M grant from the federal government will completely upend that calculus?

The Senators want to spread the money around for political reasons, but what are the odds that 60+ different companies awarded small development grants wind up assembling the pieces of a complete 5G system?

As a NASA fan, I know what to expect when the government sprinkles around these kinds of grants. It's an R&D exercise that might pay off some day in the form of a novel technology or by supporting small businesses that might move on to greater things down the line. It's not the answer to a high-profile technology race against a geopolitical adversary.

I'm all for research and/or development grants, but if you want to promote open standards and really drive the entirety of the US sector - then the money needs to be contagiously patent free (i.e. derivatives are also not patentable). Otherwise you'll do the traditional job of paying companies to develop technologies that they patent. Even worse (with respect to the objectives of this funding) China will do it's normal reverse-engineering and stomp all over the patent while other US competitors will be much more tightly bound by the domestic legal restrictions in place for IP.

You do realise that this is implicitly stating that Huawei is in front of US in tech and that is why government needs to help qualcom (like there is anyone else).

If anyone is going to do industrial espionage it will be NSA (who are probably ones crying the most since they can't just order Huawei to put in backdoors like they did with US gear).

While I suspect you're correct about the NSA just ordering US companies to install backdoors, the public story is that the NSA intercepted Cisco hardware after manufacture and installed the backdoors themselves. They could certainly do the same with hardware manufactured by Huawei.

There are not a lot of options for non-Chinese 5G tower equipment. I think the entire list is "Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung."

Ericsson was used for the majority of 5g deployments in the UK and is Sprint's current partner. They are also opening a 5g antenna production facility in the US this year to complement their R&D center in Austin that opened a few years ago.

5G has some advantages in the higher bands for throughput, but other than that, it's essentially useless.

5G will in time replace everything cellular used today. At every frequency it provides higher tower throughput. A lot of articles have been written on connection speeds when what really matters is higher tower throughput (how much tower provide to all current users simultaneously). 5G isn't just mmWave. It is the next generation of cellular equipment.

In 10 years there will be nothing but 5G equipment being deployed. Hell T-Mobile started two years ago. All the radios they put up in their new 600 MHz band are LTE/5G dual protocol radios. Nobody will be making legacy hardware anymore. Much like how today nobody is deploying 2G hardware we will reach a point where nobody is deploying new LTE hardware either.

Spectrum is finite. Data demands are continually increasing. The only way you get more throughput out of the same amount of spectrum is higher spectral efficiency (bits/Hz). 5G does that. You may think it is useless but in 5-10 years you WILL be using a 5G phone and connecting to a 5G tower as carriers shut off legacy systems and reuse that spectrum to support higher throughput as a 5G service.

If they didn't eventually your LTE service would seem as sluggish as 3G does now as demand exceeds capacity and everyone gets throttled down. Either demand for more data stops growing or towers need more throughput.

To be clear I am not saying we should subsidize 5G equipment manufacturing. Hell we are way late to this party not sure we could turn the ship if we tried but 5G will be the cellular technology which powers the world over the next decade or two.

This website goes from very well informed readers base to stereotypical tech illiterate boomer facebook comments as soon as anything remotely related to 5G is posted. Its fucking bizarre. Statistical is posting the truth and half the people seem to have their collective heads too far up their own behinds and buried in self imposed ignorance to see it.

American corporations should get no subsidy for 5g. They didn’t develop the tech because they were more interested in profits than productivity.

Yeah, teach them to do the right thing by making sure they go out of business and the market is permanently cornered by the Chinese. Man I love the "cut off your nose to spite you face" levels of hate this website has.

5g has terrible range, gets blocked by physical barriers, and wont help my life substantially. Can someone provide a reason why this billion should be used by current ISPs and not to setup municipal broadband where carriers have failed to deploy?

5G is none of those things. mmWave has those properties. T-Mobile is deploying long range 5G on the 600 MHz band right now.